


Nicks and Scratches

by Cantabrigia



Category: Warframe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, fast and loose canon, tagging as it goes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 17:39:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19024738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cantabrigia/pseuds/Cantabrigia
Summary: This is atmosphere over plot, I don't know where it's going, I'm sorry





	Nicks and Scratches

**Author's Note:**

> This is atmosphere over plot, I don't know where it's going, I'm sorry

Origin System. Sol. Gilded sepulchre of the Orokin Empire, now nothing but a rotting corpse picked over by the never-ending squabble of vultures—clone and cultist and crawling thing—hiding in the shadows of long-bleached bones.

That was Celane's perspective, anyway, and she was sticking to it even if nobody was ever around to ask. Couldn't sit down for tea with the Grineer, after all. Wasn't even sure if she _could_ ask, certainly hadn't said a word since the Lotus, whatever it was, had rescued her. The orbiter's mad computer talked, but her body, her Nyx—and _that_ was confusing as hell, her name was one of the few things she knew for sure, dragged out of the stasis cobwebs, but the Lotus had said "Nyx" and didn't, couldn't listen to her—was still new and she was still finding all the levers and maybe one of them would give her a voice capable of more than echoing around her head.

Even though the orbiter talked, it didn't seem to need to hear anyway, haptic and saccadal controls she knew she'd never learned handling all its functions almost faster than the voice could confirm them. *Almost* all its functions—there were doors the ship seemed to be pretending didn't exist, or maybe it was blocked somehow, and none of the commands seemed to open them, although there was an incessant beeping when she—no, that was just the junction alarm.

This was still dangerous, even scary. Couldn't drop out of the rail with the stealth systems engaged and it took time, seconds or minutes at crawling c for the ship's sensorium to find everything lurking in orbit. All of which could see the rail just fine, so a lucky potshot... at least the void cloak came up fast.

She was looking forward to the mission this time, at least. According to the Lotus, some sort of Very Important Corpus had dug up a cache of Tenno stasis pods, intact no less. That was interesting. The Lotus never explained much, but it sounded as though only a few other Tenno in the system were awake, and Celane had never met any of them. Maybe she'd finally be able to talk to someone.

If, _if_ this went off without a hitch. Sedna was very much Grineer territory, and their response to the Corpus intrusion made it easy to slip in, but that was where things got bumpy. The Lotus hadn't known the exact location of the cryotubes, and in the time it took to find them, the Corpus made off with at least one, melting the rest rather than leave a prize for Ruk's brigade. She could turn enemies against each other easily enough, but gripping their heads to twist the hint of a trail out of them didn't seem to be something she was capable of, so far.

At least it left both sets of vultures in no condition to stop her extraction.

Back to the ship, with its stealth effect fully engaged, inverted starfield on the other side of the glass oddly calming after what felt gut-deep like failure. Brushed off by the Lotus, who at least seemed certain that the remaining pod could be tracked—being unsealed by the Corpus had apparently triggered a failsafe, but couldn't the occupant have been surged remotely as the Lotus had done to her body?—Celane spent a good orbit pacing the ship in a mood that even the cephalon couldn't break.

#### ————

What was this? What *was* this?

A subtle change in the tapestry of fractal colour that exists behind closed eyes, from being aware of nothing to _aware_ of nothing. The follow-up, a set of pains so complete her waking psyche couldn't even interpret them for an infinite second.

What was this? She was capable of nothing but thought now, the only move available— _move, always, stillness summons death_ —to think, to define her situation, to circle it and know it and know it's weaknesses.

This, this was a hell, of edges and peeling and pins, a miscellaneous hell of sensations her body was not wired to digest, a hell that could not be seen or spoken to or moved against. _What_ weaknesses?

Time stopped; started again, shuffled the pains like a deck of cards, took away a pressure behind the front of the skull and replaced the void with vision, clamping filters over a long-unused sense until the room dropped from blinding to a collection of lambent glows.

The space is austere, cold. Uniformly grey metal, glowing in crevices that all seem to converge at the lowest edge of her view, haloing a frantic nest of multi-jointed limbs. Their blades and pincers and needles still for a moment before darting out of sight, and the pains move again.

There is a garbled sound that resolves into what must be ordered words. The words are in no language that she knows, but their presence means a crack in the mechanical facade that holds her here, a fleshy overseer that _might_ , might trip up where the machines unattended would simply continue their inflictions.

She has no chance to exploit it.

A feeling sinks in, overpowers all the pain, as if her organs are being pulled down through separate straws, so disjointed that every aspect of her awareness stutters and ceases to cohere.

 

Haniss wakes with a scream, a face inches from hers shattering—a reflection?—as glass granulates with the sound. Attempting to sit up, she can feel the grit of it in working into cuts and abrading the patchwork of armour-stripped flesh that makes up most of her body now.

The room she finds herself in is the same, an unchanging space she has woken in thirty-seven times now, each time to a new iteration of the dream, a nightmare that becomes real as soon as awareness of her body settles in.

The room is stone, carved— _melted?_ —in intricate interlocking lines. She sits on a slab, one of six extruded seamlessly from the circular curve of the wall, a sharp arc of glass above it where the others have an unbroken shell.

For the thirty-seventh time she cannot remember falling into sleep. Each time, the canopy is repaired and fragments of glass removed, although the room has no visible entrance and careful examination of the carvings has revealed no invisible one. Yet.

She steps off the slab, avoiding the immediate floor and its painful dust. Moving around the room, she starts to trace the carvings from a memorised point just below halfway up the wall, a waking ritual as essential as it has been fruitless.

The patterns are regular, rectangular. They cover every inch of the wall to the depth of a fingertip, reddened against the surrounding stone as if there is blood under the facade.

They feel like a taunt, a puzzle with no real meaning, but they are the only thing in the room that _could_ hide a way out, so they must be examined.

The next time Haniss wakes, none of the slabs are empty.


End file.
